I'm Thinking Of Ending Things (2020)
REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER
NO BIG SPOILERS (but some moments are disclosed because it’s difficult to sing the film’s praises without disclosing them, and I’m keen to sing its praises.)
I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS is Charlie Kaufman’s new film, on Netflix. It’s based on an elliptical, awkward novel by Iain Reid. Kaufman has turned in an elliptical, awkward film that is beautiful and extraordinary. It yields some of the eeriest moments I’ve seen in a movie; an eeriness that springs from such simple things as a sticking plaster changing position on a character’s head, which made me shriek, or a dog, shaking itself dry… forever.
The film does not give up its secrets easily, and it needs to be decoded, but it is worth it. It has something to say… about people, choices, and regret.
Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons play a couple who visit Plemons’ parents, played by David Thewlis and Toni Colette. All four actors are excellent. Their performances add to the strange pull of the film.
Most of the first third depicts the couple’s drive along a backlands road to the parents’ house. The journey is hit by snow that threatens - or promises - to blizzard. There aren’t many films that would just stay with the couple on the drive, including the longueurs, but much is revealed in the conversation, by the body language, and in their silences.
When the couple arrives at the house, what looks like an ordinary home is soon pulled into question by characters and viewer. It is in the house that Kaufman creates some truly terrifying moments using very little. The world is off-beam. Time slips. What the actual arthouse hell is going on? Kaufman directs the proceedings expertly, with the camera an active participant in the storytelling, using its academy ratio sometimes to wilfully obscure characters or push them outside the edge of frame.
I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS is also about identity, where characters (subtly and sometimes not so subtly) shift in appearance between scenes (a necklace changes, the colour of a coat, earrings). There’s one moment in the car at night when there is little else to see but the faces of Plemons and Buckley illuminated by the dash. Disembodied heads in the darkness. Bergman’s PERSONA is evoked and I thought at the time of watching, “okay, now I see where this is going”, except the film doesn’t go there, it takes a left turn instead and the Bergman is packed away, but the reference remains. Other works are referenced, evoked or named explicitly, included Rodgers & Hammerstein’s OKLAHOMA, John Cassavetes’ A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays, A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN, and Anna Kavan’s late 60’s post-apocalyptic novel, ICE. Aside from being present in the film as objects and/or conversations, the content of these works can also help with decoding the film; they certainly add to its thematic layering. There is another work to which the film refers, but to name it here would be to give too much away.
It is not a film that can be recommended to everybody, because it won’t be everybody’s cup of tea. If you like David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE, with its sense of dislocation and identity displacement (I think it is Lynch’s best film), then I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS ought to deliver. It dares to combine scenes of dark stillness with horrorshow tropes and dance numbers; and it wilfully omits the ending of the novel, which “explains” the situation. But it is complete. All the stuff you need is there on the screen.
